The abbey of Saint-Savin sur Gartemps
We
arrived in Paris on the morning of Friday the thirteenth in the midst of a
transportation strike, but were caught up immediately in such a swirl of
activities as to leave no moment free to fret about any possible
inauspiciousness of date. Within
forty-eight hours we had caught up with our oldest French friends, partied with a
number of my international medievalist friends, and seen miscellaneous friends
at the American Cathedral, our local parish home. We are nicely re-established in “our” apartment on the
Avenue Suffren—it is a mere technicality that it actually belongs to our
daughter—and I have reconnoitered a few favorite haunts, including the large
second-hand book market in Georges Brassens Park. But then Paris was put on hold while we made a two-day trip
to Poitiers to see Joan’s favorite cousin from childhood days, Gavin
Brown. The two had not seen
each other in half a century.
I
was not actually too keen about going.
I have a lot of work to do here, and not a lot of time to do it. Furthermore, long-lost relatives have
sometimes been lost for a good reason.
I tend to associate myself with a light-hearted maxim of my father’s: Of all my wife’s relations, I like myself
the best. I was in for a
delightful surprise.
Cousin
Gavin and his wife Valerie are ex-pat Brits who for the last twenty-five years
have been living in a deep rural commune of Poitou called Brux, about twenty
miles south of Poitiers. There
they have transformed a large, eccentric old farmhouse and its extensive
grounds into a Bower of Bliss of luxuriant climbing roses, bird song, and wild
strawberries.
Valerie
is a former television writer who has also published several novels. After a lengthy hiatus during which she
was occupied with other demands, and especially the protracted care of an
ailing mother that involved much commuting between France and the north of
England, she has now returned to her writing with renewed purpose. Gavin obviously has had an interesting life, but during our
short visit I learned little of the lengthy period between his excellent
education (Saint Paul’s School and Cambridge) and his rather astonishing (to
me) current situation. He is a
deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and divides his time between maintaining
his rustic acres, a serious job in itself, and marrying and burying people. The Catholic clerical shortage evident
even in America is acute here in France.
He
is also tasked, in his own humorous phrase, with “the mission to the
English”. I could get no agreed-upon number for the British expatriates living in various parts of the
countryside of central and southern France, but it is very large. Mostly these are retired people, many
of whom, like the Browns themselves, began with a summer retreat that became a
year-round abode. There are many
villages and hamlets in the Poitou that are now majority Anglophone! The phenomenon has been called, not
always with entire good humor, a “second Hundred Years’ War,” referring of
course to the devastating English invasions of the fourteenth century.
Anyone
who has travelled much in rural France must be at least vaguely aware of the situation, but our trip to Poitiers gave me an entirely new perspective on
it. It is not what French people
have in mind when they speak of the “immigration problem”. One could plausibly argue, indeed, that
the Brits are saving the French countryside. The exodus from the agrarian to the (sub)urban has been
particularly dramatic in France.
Not too surprisingly, perhaps, most young French couples prefer to live
in a new, nicely stuccoed cinderblock “villa” with plumb surfaces and square
corners than in picturesque converted cow barns with plumbing from the age of
Louis XV. Mostly they don’t like
to have to drive fifteen miles to a grocery store. Mostly they like to live somewhere with plausible
possibilities of gainful employment.
Animal House: Noah's Ark at Saint-Sevin
We
were with the Browns for scarcely twenty-four hours, travelling around the
edges of a railway strike. Even
so, we had a few hours of quality medievalism. Gavin had an obligation to meet with an English couple who
were planning to be married in the fabulous abbey church of Saint-Savin, and we
were able to spend an hour examining the building and its wall paintings, which
are among the oldest and best preserved in all of France, where the unpleasantness
of the Wars of Religion and the Revolution tended to wreak havoc with such
art. The narrative sequence of the
ceiling (roughly the history of Salvation from the Creation to the Exodus and
the march toward Canaan) is absolutely extraordinary.
Notre-Dame la Grande, Poitiers
We
then had an hour or two in Poitiers before our Paris train. This allowed us time for a rather
breathless progress through the city, which preserves a good deal of sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century domestic architecture in addition to the more famous
medieval churches that were our main goal: the great church of Saint Hilary
(the town’s most famous local boy made good), the Cathedral, and Notre Dame la
Grande, a Romanesque jewel-box. We
even got seats on the train, despite the crowding caused by the strike.
